The Duck of Minerva

Rodger Payne

Rodger A. Payne is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville. He serves on the University’s Sustainability Council and was a co-founder of the Peace, Conflict, and Social Justice program. He is the author of dozens of journal articles and book chapters and coauthor, with Nayef Samhat, of Democratizing Global Politics: Discourse Norms, International Regimes, and Political Community (SUNY, 2004). He is currently working on two major projects, one exploring the role of narratives in international politics and the other examining the implications of America First foreign policy.

Recent Posts

The new neighbors

by Rodger Payne | 2 April, 2009 |

Imagine for a moment that the world is a community of states. For decades, European states have lived just across the pond from some of the richest and most powerful people in the world: the Americans. While the Europeans have generally been on good terms with their neighbors, they often admit in private that the Americans can be loud, bullying, and inconsiderate of community needs.For example, Americans produce more pollution than anyone else in the community, but have been mostly uninterested in viewing global climate change as a problem that requires immediate remedial action. In this...

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Overseas contingency operations

by Rodger Payne | 25 March, 2009 |

Two months ago -- before the Inaugural -- I blogged "The 'war on terror' is over." At that time, the British Foreign Secretary said that the UK no longer used the phrase.Now, apparently, the US will stop using the phrase as well: The Obama administration appears to be backing away from the phrase "global war on terror," a signature rhetorical legacy of its predecessor.In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department's office of security review noted that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror' [GWOT.] Please use...

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Academia and “JournoList”

by Rodger Payne | 18 March, 2009 |

Yesterday, Michael Calderone ignited a media brouhaha with his Politico piece, "JournoList: Inside the echo chamber."For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList. Lou Dobbs and Keith Olbermann talked about the email listserv on their TV programs yesterday. On the right, bloggers had a field day talking about conspiracy theories and speculating about high profile members of JournoList. Red State's Erick Erickson:...

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Israeli threat inflation?

by Rodger Payne | 11 March, 2009 |

Over the weekend, the AP ran a story based on high-level Israeli sources suggesting that Iran's nuclear program has "crossed the threshold," which implied that the program is now militarized: Iran is now capable of producing atomic weapons, Israel's top military intelligence officer said Sunday, sounding the highest-level warning that Israel's archenemy has achieved independent nuclear capability.At a Cabinet meeting, the chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, did not say Iran already has an atomic bomb, participants said. However, he said, Iran has "crossed the threshold"...

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Iran’s bomb

by Rodger Payne | 2 March, 2009 |

Yesterday, Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN interviewer John King that he thinks Iran has enough fissile material to make a nuclear bomb. He said: "We think they do, quite frankly." Meanwhile, on NBC, Defense Secretary Robert Gates apparently said the opposite: "They're not close to a stockpile, they're not close to a weapon at this pointPolitico noted the discrepancy. What's going on here?The LA Times story about the interviews mentions a recent IAEA report finding that Iran has a bit more than a ton of "enriched uranium." Additionally, the...

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Iraq: the light at the end of the tunnel

by Rodger Payne | 28 February, 2009 |

We're just a few weeks from the 6th anniversary of the Iraq war -- but the end is now clearly in sight. President Obama, earlier today: Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.Even better, as Obama told U.S. troops: "mission [kinda] accomplished."We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein’s regime – and you got the job done. We kept our troops in Iraq to help establish a sovereign government – and you got the job done. And we will leave the Iraqi people with a hard-earned opportunity to live a better life – that is your...

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Iran’s Sputnik

by Rodger Payne | 7 February, 2009 |

Earlier this week, Iran put a satellite into space for the first time. The AP covered it on Wednesday, February 4: The telecommunications satellite - called Omid, or hope, in Farsi - was launched late Monday after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave the order to proceed, according to a report on state radio. State television showed footage of what it said was the nighttime liftoff of the rocket carrying the satellite at an unidentified location in Iran.At least unofficially, some experts within the U.S. government seem to be trying to play down the importance of this event -- comparing it...

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Obama at war: Pakistan

by Rodger Payne | 27 January, 2009 |

There's a new finger on the trigger, but the AP reports that Pakistan is still unhappy about U.S. missile strikes inside its territory: Pakistan urged President Barack Obama to halt U.S. missile strikes on al-Qaida strongholds near the Afghan border, saying Saturday that civilians were killed the previous day in the first attacks since Obama's inauguration.Pakistani security officials said eight suspected foreign militants, including an Egyptian al-Qaida operative, were among 22 people killed in Friday's twin strikes in the Waziristan region.But the Foreign Ministry said that the attacks by...

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XX

by Rodger Payne | 22 January, 2009 |

Laura Rozen has confirmed reports that Princeton Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter will become "the first woman to head the State Department's Office of Policy Planning, Foggy Bottom's in-house think tank."If Slaughter ever publishes an anonymous insider account about US foreign policy in Foreign Affairs, her obvious pseudonym is XX.

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Volleys in the war on terror

by Rodger Payne | 22 January, 2009 |

Barack Obama may not have formally ended the war on terrorism, but he's certainly making dramatic changes in the way it is prosecuted. From Spencer Ackerman this morning: take a look at his first not-even-48 hours in office. He’s suspended the Guantanamo Bay military commissions, a first step toward shuttering the entire detention complex. He’s assembled his military commanders to discuss troop withdrawals from Iraq. He’s issued a far-reaching order on transparency in his administration that mandates, among other things, a two-year ban on any ex-lobbyists working on issues they lobbied for....

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